The Dark Side

 Dick Cheney said 5 days after 9/11

"We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we're going to be successful. That's the world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective." 

 He then had the Department of Justice concoct a (now repudiated) legal justification to sanction torture.  Despite the reluctance of the current Obama Administration to cooperate, the Constitution Project sponsored a bipartisan blue ribbon panel to document torture during the Clinton, Bush and Obama Administrations.  They took the better part of three years, interviewed hundreds of people all over the world, and documented it all in a 575 page report that is a black eye for the United States government's disregard of the rule of law for 2 decades, and continues today.

The three administrations did it all, torture - many times torturing people to death, "suspending" the Geneva Convention rules against torture whenever they pleased, kidnapping suspects and sending them to countries that tortured them, and of course we still incarcerate them at Guantanamo without charges or trial or due process.

There were the torture instigators, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, and Yoo.  There were a number of principled people who opposed them, Alberto Mora, John McCain and Nance Pelosi to name a few.  One quote from Alberto Mora, General Counsel for the Navy (Retired) in a later interview stood out,

The argument that we have to apply abuse to detainees in order to protect American lives I find to be violative of our deepest values and to the very safety of our country. We fight not only to protect lives, we fight to protect our principles.

Well said.